Early Potty Training

I have officially witnessed my 20 month old go over to his potty, take off his diaper, sit down on the potty, grunt, and do a beautiful #1 and #2!

My husband has seen it before now, but I’ve never had the priveledge of witnessing it first hand.

I gave the little stinker a HUGE hug.

Granted, he did throw his new firetruck puzzle piece in the potty right after, but I had to choose to focus on the incredible success!!

To be honest, I have been waiting for this moment for a while. I was hoping that as soon as he was signing we would be gracefully and easily communicating his elimination needs, but…nevermind, I couldn’t be happier.

At 8 weeks we started pottying Baby J. And let me say there has been a LOT of frustration all along the way. But now I can say I fully, 100% believe in practicing the ‘Diaper-Free’ method.

I have two books in my library that focus on this subject: ‘The Diaper-Free Baby’ by Christine Gross-Loh, (their website is here) and also ‘Diaper Free’ by Ingrid Bauer. I highly recommend these books to every mother!

Opposed to what you may think, practicing diaper-free is VERY easy. You can do it on occasion, part-time, or full-time. (We chose part-time.) It is just like learning to diaper your own baby, instead you throw in a step where baby sits on the potty.

At 8 weeks, I would leave baby J diaper-free in the living room, laying on a few cloth diapers. A cute little stream of pee would float through the air every once in a while onto a diaper and I would go over to him and make a noise. Pairing this noise with the feeling of peeing, he was learning a little of Pavlov’s law.

Then one day, around 3 months, he woke from a nap with a dry diaper. I promptly hovered him over the toilet and made the noise (in our case: ‘pssss’) and he peed!

And so we kept it up, slowly but surely, exhibiting GREAT patience and love, and celebrating even the smallest of successes. And abandoning our fear of having a baby diaper-less in the house. It was quite interesting to observe other people’s reactions to seeing J buck naked and me or Andrew not running around chasing him with a diaper.

You see, babies are born ‘potty-trained’, we have an opportunity to help, listen, and learn to communicate with them to help them develop an association with eliminating. We can either train them to pee in a diaper (and then train them to not again later), or we can preserve their innate bodily knowingness to communicate their need to eliminate and help them through it.

If you have any questions about this method, please reach out. I would love to support you in practicing the diaper-free method.